Three summers ago, Kate Song, AP biology and AP environmental teacher at Castaic High School, began taking students, who were interested in cancer research, to UCLA’s Research in Focus Symposium to share their findings.
Now, students from throughout the William S. Hart Union High School District displayed their own research questions and discoveries in the annual Research in Focus Cancer Awareness Symposium at the Castaic library on Saturday.
“I started Research in Focus in the summer of 2023, with three different schools in the district. I pulled together high school students who were interested in doing research, then took them to UCLA to share our findings,” Song said. “From that, it grew every summer, and now we’re trying to spread it even further with the community, and get students involved during the school year engaging in research.”
As the initiative grows year after year, it’s exciting for Song to see new students, who have a keen interest in STEM, participate.
“I think the most exciting thing for me is to see student engagement and excitement grow. Initially, it was me doing all the work. This time, it was basically student-run. I was in the background guiding them through it. It’s exciting to see how many groups showed up and are presenting their findings,” Song said. “This year, more than ever, we’re trying to engage students all the way from freshman year, and just raise more community awareness for cancer.”
Song hopes for the club to not only raise more awareness for cancer in the future, but also to find other ways to impact patients.
“I know they’re writing some cards today. That’s a new thing that they’re doing. They’re also raising money for organizations that can do research,” Song said.
As Song, and other judges, held clipboards to judge each presentation and tri-fold poster, the students also had access to presentations — including one from a Kaiser Permanente oncologist.
Castaic senior Gina Angles, 17, who is also vice president of the Castaic chapter, discussed the process of competing at UCLA not only this past summer, but previous summers, as well.
“I’ve been in this program for two years. I did the research at UCLA two years ago, and then I did it again this past summer and won first place. We did really well at UCLA and we wanted to do more at this club, so we brought it to the high school level and tried to get freshmen and new kids involved from other schools,” Angles said. “I want to go into medicine. This year, we started our research in June, then we presented it on Aug.1.”
Angles’ group members from the summer and members of the club are seniors Hannah Moses, president, 17, Cody Tran, public relations manager, 17, and junior Joel Kim, 16.
“To choose a question to present, we first looked at pancreatic cancer, then we honed in on PDAC, which is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, and then we found out the biggest problem with this cancer. Then we focused on KRAS, and then we found out that it’s mutations. Once you dig deeper into research, you find what the problem is and ask how to solve it,” Moses said.
“The main part of our presentation was KRAS, and it’s such a complicated gene. You can learn so much about it, but even learning how it worked in the start was so difficult. Once I was able to finally understand how it works, I was able to explain to everyone, and get the ball rolling for [discussing] treatments,” Tran said.
The team, who gave a condensed, five-minute presentation on Saturday, discussed the process of creating their 15-minute, 29-slide presentation during the summer.
“We worked incredibly hard, and for the last week, we probably spent four hours every day, leading up to our presentation, just practicing knowing our presentation. We were asked questions afterwards by the doctors, so we had to know the insides and outs of this cancer, just so we could succeed,” Angles said.
“I think the a-ha moment is probably when you’re reading all these articles and just lost, and you feel like you’re just reading, like Latin the entire time, and then it finally clicks. Once you understand one thing, things will steamroll,” Moses said. “It was definitely like a shock of the amount of work it took to actually understand and put together this presentation. But honestly, it became fun for me. Obviously, it was treacherous to sit in Cody’s room practicing for three hours for a week straight and not being able to memorize our speech or understand something, but [now] it definitely feels rewarding.”
Kim, who joined for the first time this past year, and has one more opportunity to research and present during the symposium next summer, said that the process was worthwhile.
“My favorite thing to do was present. With all the effort we spent on it and then being able to showcase it, it felt very fulfilling,” Kim said. “It felt like I’m contributing to something bigger.”
